Meeting managers use various tools to conduct meetings. Current meeting tools include whiteboards mounted on a wall, transparencies (i.e., overhead slides) displayed on an overhead projector, projected slides, and flipcharts placed on an easel, as well as manually kept meeting minutes, agendas, and action lists. There are also electronic products that facilitate meeting management, including group calendar capability, conference calling, and presentation programs such as PowerPoint manufactured by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
Many of these tools, however, provide only a partial solution to conducting meetings. They fail to provide for the creation, distribution and maintenance of meeting documentation such as a meeting agenda and meeting minutes. In addition, many of the electronic tools are intended to enable participants to attend meetings from remote locations, for example, an office via a personal computer, rather than having all participants in one meeting room.
Meeting managers and participants might appreciate tools that aid in organizing, managing, tracking and documenting meetings in which most or all of the meeting participants are in one room. These tools might be even more beneficial if they automated various meeting-related actions, including planning the meeting, helping the meeting begin, progress and end on time, and documenting important parts of the meeting in real-time, for use by multiple people during and after the meeting. They might also appreciate tools that enable them to organize information and share it in a way that captures the essence of the meeting, while maintaining control over what is shared and what is private.